→ Does University Challenge have a diversity quota?
One might be forgiven for thinking that the only criteria for entering a team on University Challenge is high-level general knowledge. Instead, John Maier, a contestant in this year’s competition, has suggested that a team’s diversity is a key factor in the selection process. In a piece for the Times today, Maier wrote that “diversity was important” and “the programme aimed to ‘showcase’ the entire UK’s student population” in terms of race, gender identity and sexuality, among other factors.
Is there an ominous, hidden test peering at a team’s diversity credentials? UnHerd’s resident egghead asked the BBC press office if it could confirm whether there was a part of the selection process which assessed a team’s diversity. The response came back that “for over 60 years University Challenge has set out to reflect the UK’s student population and continues to do so. The latest series has continued that important tradition.” That settles that, then.
→ Brics economies assert dominance
Are we approaching endgame for the West? New data from World Economics (mistakenly reported in some corners as the World Bank), shows that developing countries are powering ahead across a range of metrics. Most notably, Germany has slipped behind Indonesia and Russia in terms of GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP). Now, Russia looks set to leapfrog Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy in 2024.
New world goes up by GDP PPP
The World Bank published a new ranking of GDP by PPP; Russia has closely approached Japan, while Indonesia has overtaken Germany.
China has further pulled ahead of the USA. France, Italy, and the UK have dropped down a few places. Mexico and Turkey… pic.twitter.com/QopOYuKyij
— BenAris (@bneeditor) April 7, 2024
Though the United States is second on the list, the rest is dominated by non-Western countries, including China, India, Brazil and Turkey. Barring South Africa, the Brics nations all appear in the top eight. Maybe all those wars aren’t working out too well…
→ Labour’s six major factions
Labour has always been a big-tent party. But ever since its inception, it has been riven by factionalism and endless militant struggles. Now, new research paints a clearer picture of exactly who these competing groups are. A research paper published by David Jeffery et al. shows that there are six separate groupings, all of which use markedly different language on social media and during parliamentary debates.
🚨New open-access article in British Politics where I try something new: we generate clusters of Labour MPs based on group membership & then test whether MPs from these different clusters use different types of language in the HoC and Twitter – they do!https://t.co/yLBLrSWTs8 pic.twitter.com/M4O3rsfYS5
— Dr David Jeffery (@DrDavidJeffery) April 8, 2024
The researchers outlined six factions: the Left, Tribune Soft Left, Labour Friends of Palestine, Middle East Soft Left, Unaligned Centrists and the Right. The research found that there are stark divisions particularly between “the Left” and “the Right”, including that they are significantly less likely to retweet one another. Members of “the Left” are also much more likely to tweet about union affairs and social causes while “the Right” is more likely to share posts about the NHS and the economy. Good luck defining Starmer’s beliefs…
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SubscribeI’ve been thinking about DEI a lot and what the reasoning behind it could be.
I don’t believe it’s really about lifting up socio-economically deprived minorities from poverty, despite that being the label on the cover.
I think it has to do with pandering to a political elite who view multiculturalism as a more enlightened, global way of coexisting. In that regard local cultures and communities have to be flattened in order to make room for this multicultural utopia. It is an extremely top-down process that allows no room for dissent or protest. Those who resist can conveniently be labelled as an ‘-ist’ of some kind.
This form of multiculturalism is actually not a culture, but a non-culture, much like the one you see in spaces like airports and hotels. We in the West are told to accept everyone regardless of what we may think of them publicly or privately. There is no room for religion, family, love, or any other kind of individual loyalties. Instead we must become non-religious, non-gendered, non-critical consumer-slaves to this parasitical non-culture that is designed to funnel all of our energies to those standing at the commanding heights.
Great post.
This is the key idea in your thesis: “I think it has to do with pandering to a political elite who view multiculturalism as a more enlightened, global way of coexisting.”
The obvious question is why do the so-called elites believe multiculturalism (as you define it in your post, where individualism or even group identity are not allowed) is so good? Is it purely economics? Are they trying to turn the world into one, big, homogenous marketplace that benefits them economically, or is there something else at play?
We are being led by people who view humanity as a machine to be programmed, tweaked, and monitored. The more infantile humans become, the more easily manipulated.
This was written about over a hundred years ago with the rise of mass education:
Occasional Letter Number One, Rockefeller General Education Board (1906).
Much like our ancestors we are shaped by our tools. As machines become more humanlike, so too do humans become more machinelike.
It’s a globalist ethos, combined with Liberal universalism – all the restictive ties that bind people to roots of identity in local cultures and communities must be dissolved, in search of less restricted, and therefore more authentic identities.
The irony is that identity formation and individualism are weakened and made more difficult in this kind of rootless hyper-liberalized anti-culture.
“why do the so-called elites believe multiculturalism ”
They believe nothing, just spout luxury beliefs that give them status among their peers.
Multiculturalism while living in gated white communities, ‘global warming” and multiple flight vacations, “diversity” but not when their chosen groups are overrepresented, “islamophobia” or “racism” but would never stay next to blacks and muslims.
They are hypocrites.
Nicely put. As you say.multi-culturalism delivers non-culturism. I’ve thinking hard about the potential for major international war recently, and wondering how armies will be formed given that we not yet at the drone/robot stage of armament. People will only lay their lives down for something thet feel passionately about. Non-culturalism is the.antithesis of this mindset and I know of no one of any age in my acquaintanceship space who would lay their life down for.the current version of Britain. I am puzzled about how the.globalists think this plays out. It.seems to.me that rather than moving from being somewheres to anywheres the elite have moved from being somewheres to nowheres. Were we to lose.a major international conflict, the latter.may become a bleak reality. Genuinely interested to.know what folk think on this one. What am Imissing?
It’s likely that those within your ‘acquaintanceship space’ (great term) are representative of a fairly well-educated mindset but that there’s another whole set of young people (males) who’d take up the type of training and arms of traditional warfare quite readily, especially in a defensive capacity (in similar vein to Ukraine).
I live in what might be termed a ‘mixed’ community in the North West of England so am familiar with both somewheres and anywheres. The nowheres may think of themselves as being able to plan and manipulate populations (as per the paragraphs from the early 20th century posted by Julian Farrows) but i strongly suspect they have so little insight into the mindset of large swathes of the population that, despite their best subterfuges, they over-estimate their capacities in that respect. One only to has to think of Brexit and those who voted to Leave (red wall seats, etc.) to see they really don’t get the popular mindset.
Conspiratorial ‘woe is me’ stuff IMO.
The phrase ‘multi-culturalism’ is chucked around by both ends of the spectrum in such a loose way as become meaningless.
Now on a positive, spend some time abroad and you realise one thing we still have is considerable ‘soft power’ and it’s not because we have a couple of aircraft carriers in the South China sea! It’s because of our language, arts and culture, media, and, wait for it, British values of respect for the law, moderation and tolerance. In fact folks abroad see our diversity and how we absorb it and see that as a strength (although of course the FBS and MSS will try to sow division).
There are of course a few nutjobs at the either end of the spectrum. But we give them too much weight. If we get out more we find things aren’t defined by loons as much as we might think in cyberspace.
“don’t believe it’s really about lifting up socio-economically deprived minorities”
The fact that they do things like cancel spelling bee for not being “diverse”, are never concerned about “diversity” in football or government / teaching jobs, or club Indians and Asians along with White men in IT as “non diverse”…..
Yes, it’s never about minorities or women on general. It’s tailored to benefit a smug, privileged class comprising upper class women and “victim” ethnicities such as blacks.
Access to cheap, reliable energy is the single biggest factor that influences economic prosperity. If the west continues to knee cap its energy production, it will continue to backslide economically. If we insist on dogmatically pursuing the luxury belief of net zero, we will soon find it unaffordable to chase any of the luxury beliefs so fashionable in political circles these days.
Western govts banked on zero interest rates and.ESG to enable NZ transition whilst building a moat supporting higher taxes (carbon cross border tariffs, etc).
But,.of course, the context has changed. Biden’s inflation reduction act is already running into problems because of respective input costs for reshoring purposes. We allowed our greed and post cold War hubris to lead us into a cul de sac, of de-industrialisation, and it’s by no means clear that we can get out of it, particularly at current interest rates and given sovereign debt levels. It would, in my view, require a wartime-style effort to reverse the current trend. .Sadly, the current geopolitics suggests that one possible outcome is just such ìa war within the foreseeable future.
A few years ago I applied to go on university challenge (and failed). The first round was a written general knowledge quiz. You had to write your name on the test paper, but that was it. The second round was a live team-vs-team quickfire challenge.
I don’t see how the adjudicators could have smuggled DEI screening into the vetting process. Then again, if I’d been bright enough to spot such subtle discrimination, I probably would have been bright enough to make it onto the team. Besides, the selection criteria will change from university to university. Surely the demographic make-up of each team is out of the producers’ hands?
From what I read in the Times article, teams are first and foremost chosen and put together by each individual university’s Students Union. I’m guessing the University Challenge production team send them guidelines as to what makes a team acceptable in the first instance.
Interesting. My only experience was at Manchester University, where one professor was in charge of the whole thing, unbeholden to the SU. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they also have the joint highest amount of wins.